now this is the guy that should headline the 'overrated directors' thread..

I wouldn't say overrated 'cause I like his films so far. However, the last one I watched, Bully, had a lot of elements from both Ken Park and Kids and those seemed like very very similar experiences. Even still, Bully has great stuff in it.

Random Rules: Larry Clark In which The A.V. Club asks its favorite rockers, writers, comics, or whatevers to set their MP3 players to shuffle and comment on the first few tracks that come up—no cheating or skipping embarrassing tracks allowed.

The shuffler: Larry Clark, the photographer and director best known for the controversial 1995 film Kids. Since then, he's helmed Another Day In Paradise, the perverse Showtime B-movie update Teenage Caveman, the masterful Bully, and the largely unseen Ken Park. Clark's latest, Wassup Rockers, is in theater now

The Langley Schools Music Project, "Desperado"Oh man, this is great. It's the greatest version of "Desperado" ever. [Recorded in 1976 and 1977, The Langley Schools Music Project collects the recordings of a Canadian school's children's choir singing arrangements of popular songs from the period. —ed.] I love that tune. I wrote a screenplay once—it was never done—in which I die and this little girl sings this at my funeral. That would be the best thing of all time. It's just so pure and innocent and a wonderful experience to hear it.

Dinah Washington, "Darn That Dream"There's a very, very long saxophone intro, and I forget the saxophone player's name, but it's from a live album called Dinah Jams, and it's almost a five-minute tune. It starts with an incredible solo, then she kills it. She was one of our greatest singers. In fact, that's where Nancy Wilson comes from.

Sublime, "Santeria"Sublime was one of the greatest bands ever. [Hums.] "Santeria," yeah, this is a great one. I get goosebumps when I listen to Sublime. I saw them once, just a great band. It's terrible, but it seems like some of the best singers die. Kurt Cobain was the best, and this guy was the best, and on and on. I don't think it's the heroin that makes them good. It's a tragedy.

Bob Dylan & The Rolling Thunder Revue, "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)"This is just Dylan at his best, really great Dylan. The Rolling Thunder Revue was when he was really at his best voice. I mean, he kills those songs, and that might be from the movie Renaldo And Clara. I'm not sure. Which I think everybody should see if just to see Dylan at his wildest and his best, and his best voice. Dylan was very, very important to me. Probably my biggest influences when I was 18 years old were Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. Dylan said you could be whoever you wanted to be. You could do what you wanted to do, just do it. And Bruce was all about telling the truth and cutting through all the bullshit.

John Coltrane, "What's New?"If I was on a desert island and could only have one CD, it would probably be Ballads. I probably listened to that record thousands of times. When I was in my studio in New York, where I haven't been in about three years, I would listen to it every day. I could really work with that. It's just one of the greatest records of all time, and they did a digital remaster a couple of years ago, and you can hear stuff you never heard before.

Fiona Apple, "Across the Universe"I saw Pleasantville one afternoon in New York with my daughter, whenever that came out. My daughter is 20 now, so she was a young teenager, I guess. We watched the movie, and then during the credits after the film, there was "Across The Universe" by Fiona Apple and I fell out of my chair. I mean, it just completely knocked me out, and I ran out that day and bought the soundtrack. And also put a picture of Fiona Apple on my refrigerator. I actually just met her a couple of years ago and I told her how much I liked that.typical that he would love a children's choir. (they are great tho) as for his funeral scenario, see: In America.

Sex educationAs the director of films like Kids and Bully, Larry Clark has often been accused of shocking exploitation. With his new documentary, Impaled, he's even managed to shock himself. Stephen Applebaum hears whySource: Guardian Unlimited

Larry Clark is used to his work shocking other people. It happened back in 1971 with Tulsa, a candid photographic record of his friends' outlaw lifestyle, and then again in 1983 with Teenage Lust. In 1995, scenes of (simulated) underage sex in his debut feature, Kids, fuelled outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. His last movie, Ken Park, as yet unreleased in the UK, contained actual male masturbation.

Impaled, Clark's 38-minute contribution to portmanteau art-porn project Destricted, now goes the whole way and shows a young man - selected from various lustful, or merely curious, hopefuls - fulfilling his dream of copulating with a porn actress. It is a disturbing work. Not because of the awkward, funny and downright messy sex between spacey porn star wannabe Daniel and a flirty fortysomething; but because of what Clark reveals about the pornification of the young men he auditions. Raised in a world where hardcore pornography is available, 24/7, at the click of a mouse button it is as if they are living in their personal adult movies. This time, even Clark was shocked.

"I was shocked and amazed," exclaims the lean and bearded 63-year-old, nursing a coffee. "This was an educational film for me, because I had no idea this was going on." When he asks the male applicants to disrobe for the camera, he discovers that most of them have removed all their pubic hair, just like porn stars. "It's so weird," he says bemused. "When you're a kid, pubic hair is the greatest thing in the world. Everybody loves pubic hair. You can't wait to get it. And these kids, very young kids, are shaving it off. It's like, what?"The way they describe having sex is just as bizarre. "There's no mystery. You fuck, you pull out, and you come on the girl - that's the way to have sex. It's shocking to me. I had no idea, I swear to God. But it makes sense," he reflects. "If kids see that they think that's the way to do it." Consequently, anal intercourse is also high-up on their sexual desiderata, especially Daniel's. However, accidents will happen, and poor Daniel's fantasy turns into something resembling a porno blooper reel.

Impaled is quintessential Clark: a short-form expression of his artistic mission to show life in the raw. While his critics frequently accuse him of exploitation, he regards himself as a truth teller. Impaled is art, not pornography, he argues, "because I'm an artist and I made it and it works".

But is it really that simple? Even Clark asks himself whether he might actually be contributing to the phenomenon he is documenting. "I wonder if teenagers will see this and be influenced by the other kids," he muses at one stage.

The point is that since Tulsa, Clark's work, at least as he sees it, has been an assault on hypocrisy. When he was growing up in Oklahoma in the 50s, America was supposed to be a place of "Ozzie and Harriet, white picket fences, and mom and apple pie; there were no drugs in America, there was no alcoholism." Yet Clark remembers kids coming to school with black eyes from beatings by their drunken parents, and a girl in junior high school who was regularly sexually assaulted by her five brothers. Not even Life magazine talked about this side of American society, he claims. "So I always thought, 'Why can't you show everything? Why do all these things have to be kept secret?' So when I started working, my thing was, 'I'm going to show everything without the bullshit.' So I'm not afraid of what people think of what I do. Fuck 'em, I'm just going to try to keep it real."

Clark has led his life that way, too. He did not just observe the outlaw lifestyle of his friends in Tulsa, he was part of it. He took drugs, drove around the country with his girlfriend doing petty crime, and eventually wound up in prison for shooting a man while high. "I didn't kill him, but it was pretty crazy, man." Most of his friends from that time are now dead. "For some reason I just won't die," he says, laughing grimly. "I don't know why. It's like genetics or something. Luck."

I wonder how well Daniel will survive Impaled. He looks dazed at the end, perhaps even a little bit shattered. Certainly sex is not what he was expecting, poor dear. Clark rejects the idea that he was disturbed by the experience. However, "the realisation that Daniel has done this to Daniel, you can see that in his brain," he says, "going around, because it's not like he thought it would be. And he was really fantasising about it." So is Impaled exploitation or exploration? Personally speaking, the jury's still out.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Kid rockerAt sixty five years old, Kids director Larry Clark is the oldest teenager on the block. David Whitehouse hears him mouth off about critics, censorship and Tracy Emin...Source: The Guardian

Larry Clark is angry. I feel a theme developing. "Fuck the critics" he spits. "Fuck the censors" he adds. Oh, and "fuck the police". Not forgetting "fuck Tracey Emin" either, but we'll come to that later. In conversation he might sound like what he is, a 65-year-old man with a deep, slow motion Oklahoma drawl frequently punctuated by temporarily lost trails of thought, but his words, like his films, are those of rebellious adolescence. And it's authentic - these aren't the noises of a man desperately trying to get down with the kids. He's not the uncle who "does the robot" at a wedding, has a spliff and needs carrying home with sick on his shoes by his embarrassed wife. Larry Clark is legitimately the oldest teenager on the block. Pension angst, perhaps.

Though he first came to prominence in the world of photography it was Kids, the film that crashed the 1995 Cannes Film Festival to the reaction Ronald McDonald might get clowning his way through the doors of Weight Watchers, that made him both the pre-eminent documentarist of American youth and itchiest scab on the arse of the arts establishment. The tale of a bunch of teens partying their way through New York City to the pied pipe of Telly, whose mission it is to deflower a pretty young thing unaware that he is HIV+, was one of the most controversial films in history. Underage sex? Drug abuse? Aids? The Waltons it wasn't. At the crux of its criticism was the allegation that the lingering shots of teenagers fondling each other through their underwear made Clark an exploitative filmmaker. A paedophile, essentially. To which he responds: "Do I exploit teen sexuality more than the tabloid newspapers who have pictures of famous young women getting out of a car with no pants on? No fucking way. Fuck the critics."

His next films, the brief mediocre fling with Hollywood that was Another Day In Paradise starring James Woods and Melanie Griffith in 1998 and the excellent Bully in 2002 also toyed with themes of teen violence, drugs and sex and helped to piss off conservative America yet more. But the fourth, the extremely graphic Ken Park, never even got released in the States after the censorship authorities there insisted on removing entire scenes (namely the ones where people that look like young teenagers have actual sex on camera) which Clark refused. This is just as well - without them the film could have been shown in the ad break between Corrie and The Bill.

Though he may refute that it actually is pornography, it certainly feels like it. Even the cover of the DVD, which you can import from Russia or France if you wish, features a fresh-faced whippersnapper doling out oral sex to an unseen lady friend. "Don't import it from Hong Kong though", he warns. "It says uncensored on it but they blur out all the screwing, and what's the point in that?"

His censorship is the one thing that actually shocks him. "I've been working my whole life to get an R rating," he says. "It's all to do with the MPAA [The Motion Picture Association of America], those cock suckin' mother fuckers. Let me tell you about the fuckin' MPAA. They are a censorship board run by the studios to protect their films. So they shit all over the smaller independent films like mine. This means we're allowed to watch Sharon Stone fuckin' the shit out of Michael Douglas before she stabs him, but I can't show what I wanna show. It's the most corrupt system in the world."

His new film, Wassup Rockers (produced, incidentally, by Sharon Stone) on the other hand has been given an R rating. It is the story of a group of Latino punks from South Central LA who eschew the prevalent youth culture of their surroundings - gangster rap, baggy clothes and gun crime - in favour of long hair, tight jeans and punk. In the face of potentially deadly peer pressure they look and act more like The Ramones than NWA. One day, in a fit of boredom, they head across LA to upmarket Beverly Hills where they encounter racist policemen, predatory fashion designers, trigger happy movie stars and sexy rich white girls with moody boyfriends. What starts as a gritty, if patchy, urban documentary ends as a loopy caper film as the boys tear through an affluent, alien neighbourhood on skateboards trying to return to the perverse safety of the ghetto. None of the cast are actors, but real street kids found by Clark. With its lengthy silences, indecipherable grunting and juvenile sex chat, it's a pretty accurate depiction of what it's like to spend any amount of time with a group of teenagers. And where Kids was youth and sex, and Bully was youth and violence, Wassup Rockers is Clark's take on youth and racism. One scene, where the Rockers are stopped by a cop in an affluent part of town because of the colour of their skin is taken from a real life encounter they had while out scouting locations. "All the cops in Beverly Hills are racist, everyone knows that," he shouts.

That his works still obsesses over the seedier, nastier sides of youth begs the question, does he think it's better to be young now or young then, when he was photographing himself and his friends back in Tulsa getting high and getting laid?

"The world now is a fucked up place to be growing up. I mean, we always had drugs and drink and things when I was in my adolescence, but now the world seems so much more dangerous. Aids. Violence. War. It's a fucked up place..." he nods, the memories of serving a tour of duty in Vietnam and being imprisoned for 18 months after shooting someone in the arm during a card game whilst off his napper on speed obviously not at the forefront of his mind. "But y'know what? It's still better to be young now."

Last year, Clark was asked to contribute a short film (no longer than 20 minutes) on the theme of sex to a series titled Destricted. Clark made Impaled. In it, he interviews a group of inexperienced young male porn stars, whom he naturally asks to disrobe. Choosing his favourite (a wholesome chap who would be more at home advertising Golden Grahams), he then asks him to interview a selection of female porn stars and pick one with whom to make his debut. He does - a woman 19 years his senior - and then Larry films them having sex... in a bright room, on a sofa, and with all the noises porn star style sex makes as the soundtrack. Close your eyes and it could be a film about a dog fighting a squid. It is clever, compelling, embarrassing and downright filthy. Plus, it comes in at 38 minutes... somewhat poetically, Larry broke the only rule.

It's been rumoured that Clark's next move is to film the autobiography of cult musician and artist Billy Childish. Like his movies, it would be heavy on sex - Childish being sex confessional extraordinaire Tracey Emin's ex.

"I'd like to film it. Apparently, Emin called Billy and said that if the film ever gets made she'll sue him. This is a woman who is not only an artist but is famous for a tent covered in the names of people she slept with. Including Billy's! Tracey Emin. What a stupid fucking..."

The kids stay in the pictureLarry Clark's photographs document the secret lives of teenagers - drinking, drug-taking, having sex. Shocking? Not according to their creator. "I'm just telling it like it is.'Source: The Observer

Larry Clark is 65 years old. He looks his age except for the clothes he is wearing: baggy pants and a hip-hop T-shirt. He must surely be the oldest skateboarder on the planet. The morning I meet him at the Simon Lee gallery in Mayfair, his nose is runny and his voice is low and hoarse. He looks rough and sounds like he has been up all night doing the things he used to do in the good old bad old days of his youth.

'Got to bed at four o'clock,' he growls. 'Stayed up to watch the Superbowl. I was jumping up and down on my bed like a kid when the Giants pulled it off.'

Behaving like the oldest kid on the block is just one of the things that Larry Clark's detractors hold against him. That, and his continuing fetishising of teenage rebellion in photographs and films that often wilfully skirt the fraught subject of adolescent - and sometimes pre-pubescent - sexuality.

As a filmmaker he is best known for Kids, his debut feature from 1995. It launched the careers of Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, and caused a moral panic with its depiction of a gang of young urban teenagers drinking, drug-taking and having unprotected casual sex.

'Some people seem to think I'm some kind of pervert because I film and photograph kids,' he says, 'but just look at the work. It's real situations. It's about real life. Teenagers have sex, they smoke weed. I don't think I'm putting anything in there just to shock. I really don't.'

In Ken Park, though, his even more controversial film from 2002, he included a scene in which a young boy indulges in autoerotic asphyxiation. The shock factor, though, lies not just in the subject matter but in the style in which he portrays it. His camera has a tendency to linger on its subjects, their lithe, young, often barely clothed bodies lit with lush tones. One critic described Clark's photographic technique as 'drawing you into the moral void of gorgeously sensuous squalor'.

Clark, of course, sees it differently. 'A lot of adults see my work and go, "Oh this is Larry Clark's fantasy. Teenagers don't live like this,"' he says. 'But, hey, read the papers. All teenagers have a secret life and it's always darker than what their parents think. The thing is, the kids themselves always get it. They can always tell if it's real or not.'

Clark is in London for the opening of an exhibition of his most recent photographs, entitled Los Angeles 2003-2006. It's familiar turf, a record of the four years he spent trailing a bunch of young Hispanic teenagers who live in Compton, in South Central Los Angeles, which Larry refers to simply as 'the hood'. Mostly, they are the same kids who featured in his last film, Wassup Rockers, which came and went without much fanfare. The narrative, what there is of it, concerns the coming of age of Jonathan Velasquez, a baby-faced Latino who caught Clark's attention back in the summer of 2003, when he was just 14.

What did the Hispanic kids think of him, this old guy on a skateboard who walks it and talks it like a teenager? Were they initially suspicious of his motives? 'Never,' Clark says, shooting me a dark look. 'They accepted me. They get what I'm doing, too. The thing is,' he says without irony, 'if I wasn't cool I couldn't get within two miles of these kids.'

Clark is entertaining company, but it's hard to know what to make of a grandfather who still puts such stock in his street cred. Likewise his new photographs, which are saturated in colour but oddly drained of meaning. They are not reportage or photojournalism, but sit somewhere between a street fashion shoot and a series of well-taken snapshots. As seen through Clark's lens, Hispanic teen life in South Central looks neither as dangerous nor as transgressive as he insists it is.

'They're kind of like punks,' Clark says of the scrawny kids from Compton, 'with the tight jeans and painted shoes. They have a style that they call "dressing young". Basically, they wear the same clothes they wore when they were 12, but now they're 15 or 16.'

I'm tempted to say that Clark himself invented the 'dressing young' concept, but I let it pass.

There is something about Clarke that defies cynicism. He seems both street tough and oddly vulnerable, and seems obsessed for reasons he has no interest in exploring - except through photography - with the ever-shifting iconography of adolescence: the slang, the dress codes, the haircuts. It's anthropology of a kind, but it's all surface.

What is palpable throughout is the homoerotic undertow that is a constant in all his work. He speaks of Jonathan Velasquez's 'utter lack of self-consciousness', which is certainly on display in a series of images of the boy in bulging underpants. This is where the complexity lies in Clark's photographs, in the distance between their subjects' lack of self-consciousness and the camera's all-too-aware rendering of the same.

It was ever thus with Larry Clark, but the innocent faces and saturated colours of Los Angeles 2003-2006 are a long way from the blank stares and monochrome starkness of Tulsa, his first and most powerful book, published in 1971. It remains one of the most influential photography books of recent times, its raw imagery diluted for countless fashion shoots, its groundbreaking confessional style a catalyst for the work of younger photographers such as Nan Goldin and Corinne Day. I tell him how taken aback I was when I first came across Tulsa in the late Eighties. 'Well, that work was kind of scary and shocking to me when I first spread it out to look at it,' he says. 'I remember thinking, "I have either got to burn all the negatives and shoot myself, or go down to LA and try and get it published." It took a while to do that.'

Many of the images in Tulsa were taken in the mid-Sixties, when Clark was living what he calls 'the outlaw life' with his equally self-destructive friends, shooting methamphetamine, toting guns and having sex with various whacked-out girlfriends. The foreword reads, 'When I was 16, I started shooting amphetamine. I shot with my friends every day for three years and then left town, but I've gone back through the years, once the needle goes in, it never comes out.'

Was he aware at the time that he was creating a document that was both transgressive and shocking in its rawness? 'Well, I knew I was making groundbreaking photographs because I had never seen images like that before,' he says without hesitation. 'I knew in some way that I was photographing things that were not supposed to be photographed. Forbidden things. It just happened to be things I was doing myself as an 18-year-old. In a way, it's a record of my secret teenage life.'

By the sound of it, Clark had quite an unsettled and chaotic childhood, too. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in January 1943, he claims he was 'forced into the family business at 14'. His mother was a photographer who specialised in mother-and-baby portraits. 'I was this skinny kid who stuttered really badly,' he says, smiling ruefully. 'Basically, I had to go and make these babies laugh by acting silly. I'd put stuff on my head, make it fall off, mess around some and then snap a picture soon as the kid started laughing at me. That was my apprenticeship, man.'

When I ask Clark about his father, he falls uncharacteristically silent. 'Well, I didn't have a happy childhood. At all.' Was it violent? Abusive? 'Nah. I just had a lot of issues with my father, which isn't unusual, but it just seemed to fuck me up. I think I felt ignored. Unloved.'

He stares at the table for a moment, obviously uncomfortable. I am just about to move on to another subject when he says, 'I guess what I really felt was that I was hated by my father for no reason.' Did they ever work it out? 'No. Never worked it out.' Another silence. 'He's gone now. Lived until he was 83, but we never worked it out.'

It is hard not to see Clark's continuing obsession with teen culture as a reaction to his own upbringing. Likewise, the turbulent and occasionally self-destructive lifestyle he embraced as a young man. He was, he says, 'always a loner, running fast'. He served in Vietnam from 1964 to 1966 in a unit that supplied ammunition to the troops up-country. Even that experience, though, did not impinge on his outlaw lifestyle.

'Strongest grass I ever smoked was in Vietnam. Never took any damn photographs. I used to go into the villages and smoke opium with old guys who looked like Gunga Din. It was not a good time for me creatively.'

After the speed-shooting early-Sixties years recorded in Tulsa, he embraced the outlaw life even more wholeheartedly - or perhaps desperately. I ask him to define 'the outlaw life'. He sighs, though whether this is out of weariness and regret, or impatience at my line of questioning, is difficult to tell.

'It was just far-out stuff, crazy stuff. I had a girlfriend who was a prostitute. We had a racket together. We'd go around Oklahoma to doctors. Crooked doctors. She'd go in and give them a blow job and they'd write us some prescriptions.'

He laughs a hard, hollow laugh, and shakes his head. 'I ain't saying it was good or bad, it was just crazy. I didn't earn a dime from commercial photography because I couldn't get it together. I was out there on the battlefield a long time. A drug addict and an alcoholic.' How bad did it get? 'Real bad. Put it this way, when someone I knew would die, which happened a lot, I'd think they were one of the lucky ones. I honestly used to think I was cursed to stay on earth and make photographs.'

He returned to Tulsa a few years back to see if he could make another body of work on the same subject. The sheer scale of the methamphetamine epidemic defeated him. 'It's massive now, not just in Oklahoma but all over the country. And, it's grimmer. I wanted to do a film, too, but it was all just so dark and depressing. I couldn't find any hope.'

To Larry Clark's credit, there is always a glimmer of hope in his work, the fleeting chance of redemption. Even in Kids, supposedly his most amoral film, it's there, flickering.

For better or worse, Clark has created at least two signatures: the raw, unflinching imagery of the Tulsa photographs, and the meandering, observational, but seldom illuminating style of his films. And, I have to say, he is great company, one colourful anecdote rolling into another, his enthusiasm and unflagging self-belief a breach against all the critical flak he endures, and, indeed, wilfully incites. Is he utterly amoral? No. Is he often misguided? Yes. Then again, true obsessives often are.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

There's this little film made back in 1986 called Mona Lisa. Bob Hoskins starred as George, a man just out of prison who takes a job chauffeuring a high-price call girl named Simone (Cathy Tyson). As first, they're opposites who argue, but then they foster a friendship which leads him to help her out and get embroiled in a mess with the underworld. Michael Caine co-starred as an underworld boss, and Hoskins earned himself his only Oscar nomination.

23 years later, Production Weekly's Twitter feed reports that the film is getting a remake. Mickey Rourke will add another film to his ever-increasing roster and star alongside the radiant Eva Green. That should throw the whole relationship into another dynamic. Hoskins might be able to show the toughness, but he's no ex-wrestler and tough guy of Sin City. The big kicker, however, is the director. Larry Clark, helmer of Kids and Bully, will grab the directorial chair.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

This could actually be awesome if Larry Clark doesn't go off the deep end with it.

Yea, Larry Clark lives with the vision that only he understands the underbelly of society, but he's made a career out of obvious statements about society. He's a peephole filmmaker of our smut, but because that is all he has, he's becoming a lethargic Marquis de Sade. The problem is that he continues to try to out gratify his last film.

Still, I'm interested. I root for him because he lives on his own edge. Also, because Eva Green is in it. I have no such thing as a queen beauty in film to admire, but she's the closest thing for me. Thumbs up to Eva Green pushing the nudity envelope.

Photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark has contributed his imagery to some of the finest art institutions in the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Now the 'Kids' director can add the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris to his list with his first French retrospective, 'Kiss the past hello.' This special exhibit encapsulates fifty-years of Clark's artistic career, with over two hundred original prints (many being shown for the first time), as well as a first-time screening of his 1968 16mm film on teenage addicts, 'Tulsa' -- the precursor to his 1971 photography book of the same name.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol